2021-04-16 11:00  P5A-1

How Inflationary Gravitons Affect Gravitational Radiation and the Force of Gravity

Richard Woodard

This talk is based on arXiv:2103.08547 with Lintao Tan and Nikolaos Tsamis. On a general homogeneous, isotropic and spatially flat background the graviton self-energy from matter requires four structure functions, whereas the contribution from gravitons requires nine. I give a convenient representation for these. I then use the graviton self-energy to quantum correct the linearized, effective Einstein equation, and I specialize the new formalism to the case of plane wave gravitons and to the two potentials that represent the gravitational response to a point mass. I then show how an old D=4 result (hep-ph/9602317) for the one graviton loop contribution to the graviton self-energy can be extended to give the fully renormalized result, and I employ it to work out one loop corrections.